Studio33 has released part II [part I] in its series of articles looking at the current state of Haiku. "In the previous part I talked about the achievements of the Haiku Team since the project was first started, this time I will go deeper into the work that has been done lately and which parts need serious attention in the coming months." Screenshots o'plenty, boys and girls.

What axeld was stating was only that there were GPL drivers in the source tree. They are not "distributed" with Haiku by default.

When building Haiku, a developer must specify when running ./configure that they want to "include gpl addons" if they want them built with the OS. This means that a default distro of Haiku would not contain the GPL drivers and would therefore be distributed under the MIT license.

Since the MIT/BSD license is GPL compatible, someone distributing Haiku with the GPL addons can distribute the rest of the OS under that license as well and provide all source code as required by such.

Furthermore, drivers in BeOS/Haiku don't necessarily need to be compiled into the kernel as they are in Linux - so someone building a driver for Haiku using GPL code would not be including their source as part of the kernel per-se. The drivers can be copy/pasted to the kernel's add-ons directory where the kernel would have them loaded during bootup to see if they apply to any hardware. As such, I'm not sure that GPL drivers for Haiku would require the rest of the OS to be GPL'd.